ISP Capping Is Becoming the New DRM 395
Crazzaper writes "There's a lot of controversy over ISP capping with Time Warner leading the charge. Tom's Hardware has an interesting article about how capping is the new form of DRM at the ISP level. The author draws some comparison to business practices by large cable operators and their efforts to protect cable TV programming. While this is understandable from the cable operator's perspective, the article points out how capping will affect popular services such as Steam for game content publishing and distribution, cloud-computing and online media services. Apparently this is also an effective way of going after casual piracy."
Re:In Europe (Score:3, Informative)
I live in Belgium too, and what they're charging here for bandwith and download limits is WAY of the charts compared to most other western countries in the world
To make it clear: I'm paying 42,91 (that's $56,69) / month for 15 Mbps and 25GB limit...
the whole isp capping is a big scam (Score:5, Informative)
I run several huge sites (bigger than slashdot)
and we use 1200 to 1500 mbit outbound at anytime
our agreements with datacenter and carries mean we pay $US 4.5 a mbit @ 95th percentile during peak hours ONLY (thats 12:00 to 24:00GMT)
outgoing bandwidth offpeak time is FREE
incoming bandwdith is FREE
alot of large isps such as Comcast or UPC can peer for practically free with datacenters (who are heavily outbound) as these isps are heavily inbound
this whole bandwidth cap is a joke, and site operators already pay alot of the privilege and were talking about pricing per mbit per month here not per GB
In the UK... (Score:2, Informative)
I don't do huge amounts of downloading- I grab the occasional bootCD and download some TV shows, but considering the former only accounts for ~5 gigs a month and the latter is advertised as the main use for my connection (Or at least my ISP keeps telling me I should do it more!). I've called them up several times to ask them why they keep adding bandwidth usage on protocols I don't even use (VOIP I don't use, yet last month I had 4 gigs of usage on it. FTP likewise.), and their support was utterly useless every time I've called.
I'm currently with PlusNet, a subdivision of BT. My options are essentially A) Another BT Wholesale reseller, or B) An Entanet reseller. The Entanet reseller option was looking peachy but apparently sometime in the last few months they've gone for adaptive rate limiting and 'red flagging' high-bandwidth users. Where there used to be a 30/300GB (On/offpeak) package is now a 30/??? package.
Is there much scope for other telecoms companies? Does the cost of laying new cable and more fiber not get offset to some extent by the fact that people would use your service?
Welcome to my world (Score:4, Informative)
where capping is the norm here in Australia. It's just a wild guess but maybe this is just an ambit claim to make more money, you think?
Next they'll be filtering the internets...
Re:In Europe (Score:1, Informative)
While capping may suck for those who have not experienced it, this has been quite normal in Australia for a long time. In fact, unlimited internet to me seems like the exception, rather than the norm. It's all what you are used to I guess.
Re: fixed amount of bandwidth (Score:5, Informative)
And not only is there a fixed amount of bandwidth, but they oversell this bandwidth by a large margin. To build out a system where each and every person could utilize 100% of their bandwidth at one time would cost a fortune...and it wouldn't be sold for 29.95 a month.
Go and look at some prices for services with guaranteed bandwidth. Suddenly, the tiered prices don't look so bad.
As someone who worked at an ISP, I do feel for them. I quit my job because I could see the coming bandwidth crunch where I worked and I knew that no matter how we tried to play it, we would piss people off.
transporter_ii
Re:Why Not Just Metered Service? (Score:5, Informative)
> Because the cost to the ISP isn't based on how much I use.
No. Their last mile capacity depends on your peak uasage but as soon as you get far enough upstream to be dealing with the aggregation of a significant number of users it depends on average usage. There is no ISP that would not have problems if all its customers maxed out their connections at once.
Re:the whole isp capping is a big scam (Score:5, Informative)
You're comparing apples and oranges - internet transit bandwidth is cheap because for a particular piece of switch or fibre infrastructure in a data centre (where your hosting is), there are multiple commercial uses and plenty of opportunity to sell your bandwidth so it's used maximally. This results in a multi-tier system where you pay for a commodity according to volume, and a handful of centralised engineers can maintain it. Your sites are reaping the benefits of that economy.
The infrastructure for providing data bandwidth to residential areas has usually been put down by one or (if the area is lucky) two companies, involving very expensive digging up of public land. The return on investment for a particular piece of cable can only be provided by the homeowners, who are very price-sensitive compared to businesses. This infrastructure is mostly single-homed, needs roving national teams of engineers to maintain, and for a return that is often heavily regulated.
That's why (as a relatively small player in broadband, but a larger one in hosting) we pay £300-odd per Mb for connectivity to *any home in the UK*, but only £5-15 for "internet transit", where we're not the ones paying for that expensive last mile of connectivity.
Re:Why Not Just Metered Service? (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, you are entirely wrong. ISP have two sets of costs. One is for providing a connection. The other is for the amount of data you transfer off-network. It costs them the same amount to provide me with a 10Mb/s connection that I use to transfer 1GB/month or a 512Kb/s connection that I use to transfer 1GB/month. The fact that they provide me with any connection at all incurs fixed costs in terms of infrastructure. The amount of data I transfer incurs costs from their upstream providers (or, in the case of the really big ISPs, the traffic affects the networks that will peer with them for free).
This is why ISPs have been slowly moving from tiers based on different speeds to tiers based on usage amounts. The cheapest packages generally don't seem like good value, because the cost of providing the line is a fairly major part of them, and per-GB they are very expensive. The only reason that faster lines cost more is that they make the usage spikes bigger. If you go from 0 to 100% usage on a 512Kb/s line, it produces a much smaller spike than if you do the same on a 10MB/s line, and this makes it harder for the ISP to estimate their maximum total transfer and therefore the capacity they need for their upstream links. This is part of the reason why a lot of them have started providing different on-peak and off-peak caps.
Workaround for Comcast Cap: Earthlink. (Score:5, Informative)
Ask Earthlink's semi-automated chat service about the Comcast Cap applying to their cable-modem-over-Comcast's-wire service, and they'll tell you that it doesn't apply to you because you're Earthlink's customer and they have no such policy. You'll save a couple bucks based on the local Comcast price, but you'll be limited to to the 6mbps/768kbps which is Comcast's lowest speed level. (Though you'll still get the Comcast PowerBurst instant speed double.)
That, and people will wonder why you have a @earthlink.net e-mail address still...
Re: fixed amount of bandwidth (Score:4, Informative)
"In 2008, TW made $4,159 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $146 Million to support the cost of the network. 2008 total profit on high speed data: $4.013 Billion"
Re:So who gets rationed? (Score:5, Informative)
I completely believe there is fine print. Regardless, they sold it as "unlimited".
This requires a bit of context, doesn't it? "Unlimited" began being advertised at a time when dialup was charging for hourly use. The cable companies saw an opportunity here - "always on" connections that were not time limited. Hence "unlimited". I don't think there was a discussion around unlimited bandwidth even then -- just an assumption of unlimited connectivity in comparison to the time-limited usage of dial-up.
So you think they'd get with the times and stop advertising unlimited, right? Well... guess what, they have. I can't find any of the major carriers advertising "unlimited" service, and haven't for several years now. So maybe you were among those who did sign up when they advertised "Unlimited" [connectivity] - your TOS agreement also lets them change that whenever they want.
This isn't what we want to hear, but it seems to me that they're the basic facts of the matter.
Re:So who gets rationed? (Score:0, Informative)
ISP's live and die by the oversell, and this isn't new mate. You ever wonder how an ISP could afford 50,000 phone lines back in the day? They couldn't, of course, for the $19.95 a month that most people were paying. They oversold the lines at least 20 to 1!
Today it's the same for bandwidth. You think that someone is going to be able to afford selling individuals the equivalent of 4-10 (or more) DS1's DS1's for less than a US$100 when a DS1 (1.5 aka T1) still costs 3-5 times that? (Depending on area)
I guess in Europe, it's E1, but you get the idea...
Re:a market based entirely on Artificial Scarcity? (Score:3, Informative)
Monday, July 17, 2006 [blogspot.com]
Unfortunately for CA the plant owners did exactly what was to be expected given the rules established by the state.
CA's legislature thought they had setup that met their political goals - keep prices low to voters but in reality screwed up their entire pricing structure. Let's see - price caps (and rate reductions) to end users no matter what the supply cost was; mandated supply even if the cost was more to the utility than what they are getting paid; and a pricing model that encouraged getting the highest cost plants online as much as possible. Despite some warnings that this would happen the legislature touted the bill as a great thing - and when things went south they ran as fast as they could from accepting any of the blame for screwing things up.
Re:In the UK... (Score:3, Informative)
There are still a few good ISPs out there, but yeah they are very few and far between.
http://www.bethere.co.uk/ [bethere.co.uk] is probably the best I know of and from experience, it's truly unlimited in pretty much every way, and it's not ridiculously overpriced unlike others which may offer similar services.